Foreword 1: In my last column, I covered a pretty controversial topic that needed to be spoken about, and the facts made clear for everyone to read. However, I do accept that at some point in my dissertation explanation, I took a decidedly obvious turn from clear, unbiased statement of facts to pure rage-ism, and that perhaps was a little uncalled for. I will state that though it wasn’t my intention, it did serve to emphasise what a frustrating topic of conversation it was, akin to banging one’s head against a golden brick wall when one could just as easily have taken a few chips off that wall and gone and sold it for a profit. I’m not sure where I’m going with that metaphor. Point is, when it comes to talking about some things, one’s composure levels are tested. I’m going to look at it, as I always do, in a positive light, since it shows how passionate we can be, as gamers.

Foreword 2: In the edition of Readers Digress that is previous to this column, I covered a topic called “Gaming Publishers And Their War On The Second Hand Sales Market” and upon completing that little semi-column, I realised that I had stumbled upon something that was actually worthy of a full on column, and needed far more explanation than the quick, simple thing I did there. There were also other aspects that needed covering, and so I chose that as my topic for this week because I figured I would cover it while it was still fresh in the mind.

Foreword 3: This will then be the second time that I will hold off on speaking of 3D in games, after I held off on speaking of it in my last column as well. Perhaps I’ll leave it for an issue of the Readers Digress as a synoptic sort of “key points only” discussion rather than a full on column.

Foreword 4: Speaking of the Readers Digress, I hope that everyone here is reading it and enjoying it, and that you all will be sending in your own pieces as well. The Readers Digress is a reader submissions paradise that thrives on you, the reader and gamer, talking about those things that you feel you’d like to talk about. I wanted this for you guys because I have been on so many other websites that report news where user’s opinions (let’s for the sake of arguments say the good ones) were lost to the comments section of various articles and no credit was given to a user for presenting a well laid out, educated response to an article. Which other news website lets its readers have a say as well? So come on, get submitting and support yourself by supporting the Readers Digress. Wow, that actually sounded like a sixties advert for the army…

Foreword 5: Just kidding! There is no Foreword 5 except a Foreword 5 to tell you that there is no Foreword 5.

Okay, so with all of that out of the way, and since everybody was too lazy to click the link in Foreword 2, or even read it for that matter, allow me to first quote my original piece in the Readers Digress that is previous to this column:

Gaming Publishers And Their War On The Second Hand Sales Market

CAVESHEN RAJMAN, DURBAN — You’ve seen it around enough, by now. Electronic Arts have begun to issue online passes for the multiplayer components of their games, essentially cutting out any possible multiplayer features for the person who buys a game of theirs second-hand, unless this person is willing to pay a little more for a new pass.

Now, we get it, publishers. The resale market is huge, and it has a direct impact on your profits. Indeed, if the resale market were to disappear for a week then retail profits would sky-rocket for publishers. But then, for the second week when they release some new game, do you know what would happen? Gaming sales would plummet, is what would happen.

See, lots of people use the resale market as a cheaper means of acquiring games that they are otherwise unsure of. A fact that has stood the test of time is that if a gamer is a fan of a series and enjoys the games from that series, assuming they’re not some fifteen-year-old pirate, they will buy a game at retail, if not pre-order it, which is something I spoke of in the previous edition of Readers Digress. However, if they are unsure of it, you can’t expect them to part with their hard-earned cash on a hunch or because the cover looks cool (something that would have got the otherwise outstanding Mass Effect pretty much zero sales) or some other reason that borders on taking a risk. As you, the publisher, are unwilling to allow most developers to come up with new IPs because there is an inherent risk in such a practice, gamers are unwilling to purchase at retail, new IPs because there is an inherent risk in such a practice.

The resale market exists, then, as an extended demo service, where gamers may, for a fraction of the cost of a retail copy, try out a game that they feel they might like, and if their choice is proven to be a good one, then, and this is where you pay attention, publishers, they will buy more of your games in future and your sales will increase tenfold. And if it’s a bad choice, then of course they’ve not lost as much as they would have, at retail price. With this in mind, it seems like rather than just being profit-hungry and a little selfish, what publishers are also doing is trying to stop people from taking the safer choice of the resale market, and expecting them to pay full price for an otherwise “bad” game that they perhaps wouldn’t have paid full price for in the first place, had they known.

It’s these two factors that cause publishers to have now started a full on war with the second hand, resale market. They don’t want you game-swapping and trading and selling your played copies of your games. And how will they stop you? Well since they kind of can’t, they’re going to punish the person whom you will sell / trade to instead.

How dare you not give them your money.

Really, publishers?

This is required reading, so just read it already.

Done? No? Okay, I’ll wait…

Now? Awesome. Let’s continue then…

Immediately upon completing that little piece, it hit me — quite of the blue, which I find coincidental since my room is coloured royal blue, “King” that I am — that I had stumbled upon something that, before that point, I hadn’t even considered as a factor.

I realised that I couldn’t just leave it at that. I couldn’t simply walk away from such a topic that up till now, I don’t even recall anyone having ever mentioned in such a light.

I had to go into it. I had to ameliorate my point.

Once again, the title of this column is killing my climax-building buzz… Oh well.

So the gaming resale market exists and is huge in today’s day and age. People buy games, play those games, and then sell them to someone for a reduced price (usually) in order to recover at least some of their funds in order to buy more games, and the cycle repeats.

Piracy as we know it, though it is far better detailed in a guide by one Koroush Ghazi on the Tweakguides website which you can read here, is considered to be the theft of intellectual property by an individual.

We’re not going to discuss the higher ethics of it here, or the pros and cons or anything of that sort. After all, there’s a reason I linked that guide which nobody has clicked on.¹

No, for today let’s just call piracy the act of, in this context, acquiring a game through — more quasi-legal, but — illegal means for the benefit of oneself and with no profits incurred by the publisher of the game.

We’ve all seen it before, people download a game off the internet and then play it on their PCs, or they will go and get their consoles flashed, chipped, modded or whatever else to allow those machines to play the games that they will go and download off the internet or buy from the guy who flashed, chipped, modded or whatever else’d their consoles.

Many of these people will then go onto the internet and purport that piracy is a sin punishable only in the ninth circle of hell — Treachery, according to Dante’s Divine Comedy — and that it is something they would never do.

Oh sweet hypocrisy…

Digression averted, let’s consider the statement of piracy then:

Game publishers incur no profits from the act of piracy. Their intellectual property is acquired by a gamer through a means that offers the game publisher no financial return, though the gamer in question gets the full benefit on their side without the financial loss of actually paying for a game.

Let’s consider the resale market, or indeed just lending your friend a game:

Game publishers incur no profits from the act of resale. Their intellectual property is acquired by a gamer through a means that offers the game publisher no financial return, though the gamer in question gets the full benefit on their side without the financial loss of actually paying for a game.

Now, before you argue that the initial person paid for the game in the latter scenario, is that not also true of the former scenario, just on a different scale of quantity?

Leaked releases aside, someone somewhere paid for a game and then uploaded it onto the internet for everyone to download.

Yet we will attempt to persecute the former scenario’s involved for doing what the latter scenario does, just on a different scale of quantity.

And then we wonder why gaming publishers want the resale market gone.

I know what you’re thinking. “Do you ever stop talking?” To which the answer is, only when I’m gaming. But also: “Wow, way to contradict your own standpoints there, genius.”

Indeed it is a contradiction of sorts, and it does strengthen the argument that publishers might have against the resale market, with all of their hatred for it.

The fact as it stands is that the act of reselling a game provides two people with the — arguable — full benefit of the game, yet the publisher receives income for only one of those people. The question then is, is this considered piracy?

Of course not. That’s just silly… Or is it? (Cue that quizzy stare with the one raised eyebrow and the eyes popping out.)

On the one side, it certainly might seem quite unlike a silly statement, in that as with the person who illegally downloaded the game, someone who bought a used copy also acquired the game through a means that gave the publisher no income from the act of acquisition. Sure they paid money for it, but they paid that money to someone who initially bought the game, and then got to sell it, tax free. Granted, that’s usually not for a profit, but even at eighty percent total worth, it’s not a bad return for the initial purchaser. Many people actually do this and manage to keep their gaming habits afloat with minimal extra expenditure. I myself have begun to do this of late as my other avenues for acquiring games have dried out (blame the recession).

And then there’s the flip side where you go “well of course that’s a silly statement, umadbro?” Let’s use the example of a household with two gamers in it. Let’s make these hypothetical gamers siblings since I can relate to such an occurrence within a household. Both of them have gamertags over Xbox Live — because of course, PSN is still down — and both of them play the same games. So for this month, hypothetical sibling X buys a game. Both of them play it. One paid nothing for it. Do you see the point that I’m making here? Let’s for the purposes of extending my little scenario into the realm of unnecessary, say that for the next month, hypothetical sibling Y buys a game, because hypothetical sibling Y tries to be fair that way, and again both of them play it though only one paid for the game.

To insinuate that the latter constitutes piracy is a silly notion. Indeed, laughable in polite company.²

By that logic, because I like to use the word logic since it’s really cool and intelligent and stuff, lending a game to a friend also shouldn’t be considered piracy.

The only remaining question then is whether the introduction of actual finances for personal gain, would count as piracy.

As a young, naïve little gamerling I would walk through the local flea market and stop at this stall where a guy would sell games which I found to be bargains. I mean, how could FIFA99 cost some R300 in stores yet he had it for R100 in a jewel CD case. My sister would be my “person-in-charge” during these outings and she would always refuse my pleas for a new game from that guy and his stall. And then one day, mysteriously (at the time), he vanished from there. Many years later, when I was far more understanding of such things as piracy, I came to discover that he was raided and his stall subsequently ceased to exist as a front for his illegal ventures.

A shame. He was a nice guy, too… Guess they always are.

His crime was, perhaps, downloading and selling games.

Now look at your average game reseller. They buy a game, play it, sell it to someone else, tax-free.

What is their crime? Though I’m sure tax evasion might count somewhere, is it silly to say that they are doing something similar to your average pirate-retailer?

For the purposes of this column, and since I’m probably going to be expected to not just ask the questions but also answer them as well, and something about spoon-feeding, I’m going to say yes it is silly to compare the two.

However, it isn’t really that silly.

While I’m sure that nobody will actually judge a person for reselling games, in fact most people encourage it since it means that there’s more games for everyone that way, I do feel that nobody actually stops and takes heed of the fact that we are essentially denying publishers money.

A good thing or a bad thing? You decide.

I will however re-state the point that publishers and the gaming world need the resale market in its current form, because it is the means with which many, many gamers acquaint themselves with and become fans of new series.

I have no offocial figures to go on here and so may be completely wrong ut I do believe that publishers make a substantial profit off the sales of new games and so should really not be concerned with the resale market but in the same breath I must mention that piracy is probably a big contributor to the newfound war on resale.

The resale market is out there in the open, it is tangible and publishers know how to lob its head off but piracy is a different beast. How do you stop it? DRM, online passes? Because those really do seem to do more harm to the honest people than good against pirates.

If it comes to a choice between waging war on resale or piracy it’s obviously far easier to go for resale as a means of broadening the bottom line and reclaiming some ‘lost’ revenue.

http://twitter.com/HeXd084 Mike E

Personally the informal selling to a friend, lending, giving away, etc behaviour is (and should be) a normal part of gaming culture. If I have a good game I have enjoyed, and a friend I trust not to screw up my disc, why can’t I lend it to him/ her?

The problem comes in when it becomes institutionalised, be it piracy or reselling. It’s pretty messed up if the publisher (or rather the developer) gets screwed while a second hand game shop makes money repeatedly reselling the same copy of a game.

The practical effect of that is the same as the flea market guy selling pirate copies, he is making money at someone else’s expense.

Dean

Reselling or lending doesn’t constitute piracy. Piracy is seen as theft (which it kind of is) but better yet copying. That’s where the IP issues comes in: copyright relations. So peoplencopy and steal IP and that’s piracy.

When you borrow a game you only share it, there’s no copy or theft.

Copyright on a product is diverse. For a game there’s more than one copyright. There’s at least two, namely, the copyright of the content (ip) and the right to use that freely. When you buy a game you buy a right to use the game, not the right to IP. Therefore copying it for piracy to distribute is a breach of that. It’s a copy because people can download while you have a copy, that’s not sharing.

When you buy the right of use (what you get when you buy a game) that’s your right to use as you please. You don’t own the ip but rather to enjoyment, and you can share that. There’s no problems.

That’s why the issue annoys publishers because they have no right to stop you from your right which you paid for. They can only make others pay a bit too via strange methods. They always own the game and the IP.

GANKSRUS

The problem is, is that “piracy” is NOT a crime and yet somehow this country has been tricked into thinking that it is. And not only is it not a crime, but it also has been PROVEN (look at the music industries sales figures around the time Napster started and when it was shut down) to INCREASE sales.

Point one: Copyright law only prohibits SALE of copied goods, not distribution. Your example of the siblings proves it. You are allowed to make copies of intellectual goods you have purchased, and you are allowed to distribute those copies as long as you dont PROFIT off them. Which online piracy doesnt do. Now recent law making might have changed this, but that was NOT what the intention of copyright laws was. Just like Patents. NOTHING stops anyone from copying a patented product for their own use, they just cant SELL that product without the patent holders permission.

Point two: Piracy doesnt really hurt sales. Entertainment companies (Ill just refer to the music/game/movie industries as M/G/M from now on) always equate a pirated copy of a product as a lost sale. But this is STUPID, because most people who pirate something either wouldnt have the money otherwise, or wouldnt have gotten it if the product was not free. You can see this in the real world as well. The publisher of The Witcher 2 saw that piracy was MUCH higher in the much poorer areas around Germany like Poland, and MUCH lower IN Germany, where the average wealth was higher. Indicating that MUCH of piracy was simply due to the fact that the people who pirated their game simply could not have afforded it otherwise. Another real world example is the movie industry. Despite their continuing gripes that their industry is on a spiral downward because of piracy, their % of GDP contribution, employment figures and profit figures have remained consistent over the last 20 years, WELL before piracy hit mainstream. And even among those who COULD afford a product but pirate it anyway, most of them WOULD NOT have bought the product if it was not available illegally.

Point three: Piracy actually HELPS sales. I have pirated games and movies and music. And guess what? The ones that I liked, I BOUGHT. Games that I have pirated that I enjoy, I buy retail so I can support the developers and have access to features that pirated copies do not have, games I dont like, I delete. Movies I pirate that I like I see in the theaters and usually buy the DVD when it comes out, and if I like the songs off an album I download, then I buy it. Simple as that. And you can see this from the music industries sales in correlation with Napster. When Napster was around, music sales were the highest they have been in decades and were higher than they are now, after Napster was taken down, they plumeted.

Point four: Piracy really does not affect companies bottom lines. Games are kinda strange in this respect because they are the exception, but I do not feel sorry for them with the straight greedy, money grubing practices they have been practicing lately (extensive and debilitating DRM, day-one-DLC and exuberant prices for minor content updates, lack of loyalty with player bases, general disregard for putting out a quality product in favor of pumping out releases one after another, etc, etc, etc). As for the others. The music industry does not make their money off of CD sales, they make it off of live shows and royalties (which people who were going to pay for it will still whether or not they pirated the CD) . The movie industry does not make their money off of DVD sales, they make it off of the box office and endorsements (again, someone who wants to see it in the theaters will still pay for it regardless of whether or not they pirate the DVD)